6 Wild Ideas from DARPA's Starship Conference

The stars are so far, and humans' current space-travel range so limited, that it could take 100 years or more to even design a ship to travel interstellar distances. This weekend in Florida, though, dreamers gathered at a DARPA conference to take the first step: Batting around crazy ideas for how humanity could colonize the galaxy.

6 Wild Ideas from DARPA's Starship Conference

6 Wild Ideas from DARPA's Starship Conference

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is known for its ambitious timetables. But even the mad scientists there expect that just building humankind's first ride to the stars will take 100 years. Although actually traveling to the stars remains a faraway dream, the experts at the DARPA-sponsored 100 Year Starship Symposium this past weekend in Orlando reached something close to a consensus on how to get started, and what it will take to realize their vision.

Top engineers, physicists, and even science fiction writers put their heads together in what physicist and conference track chair James Benford called the "finest, widest, deepest coverage of starships that has yet occurred." The 205 papers submitted (of which about 40 were presented), explored propulsion possibilities, extraterrestrial habitats, the ethical implications of scattering humankind's progeny through the cosmos and more. The result: a step-by-step roadmap for settling the galaxy.

Michael Belfiore is the author of Rocketeers: How a Visionary Band of Business Leaders, Engineers, and Pilots Is Boldly Privatizing Space.

First, Let's Get Off This Rock

First, Let's Get Off This Rock

One planet is simply not enough. Today's merely terrestrial economy can't support what's likely to be a multitrillion dollar, century-long project. Over the next 100 years, we'll need to harvest the energy and materials of the entire solar system, and use our explorations to the other planets, moons and asteroids of our solar system as a springboard to the monumentally more complex task of launching a starship.

Plus, Jill Tarter, research director at the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence Institute, gave two compelling reasons for settling space and then pushing out beyond the solar system. "We need to solve the single-point failure that is our human civilization on this single planet Earth," she said. "We need to think about colonizing other bodies in the solar system to protect ourselves against a failure from our own technology, from our misuse of our resources and environment, or from a wandering interstellar rock that creates a civilization-ending impact."

For such a sustained, expensive effort, we'll need more than the efforts of a beleaguered space agency like NASA, or even a larger bureaucracy such the Department of Defense. It's got to be an organization with extreme longevity and massive fundraising power. Interestingly, when trying to come up with an example of such a group after which to model a starship organization, conference-goer James Schalkwyk, a graduate student at the University of Cape Town, could think of only one in modern history: the Catholic Church.